Message-Id: <199402022034.AA27362@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Wed, 2 Feb 1994 21:33:15 +0100
From: Frank Mittelbach <MITTELBACH@mzdmza.zdv.uni-mainz.de>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: On the death of cal
Status: R

> Subj: On the death of \cal

> This is old stuff, but I was curious why it was so important
> to remove \cal and thus require changes in a million .tex files?

\cal isn't really dead because the standard classes still define it
although it isn't recommended. There was the decision to normalize the
interface on the user level providing commands with arguments and
similar names eg \mathbf \mathcal \math... for math alphabets.

There are two schools if you like: Don Knuth promoting a simple
interface for fonts in plain that uses {\rm...} in math and Michael
Spivak promoting commands like \bold{..} \roman{..} ie commands with
arguments. LaTeX 209 used the plain concept but in all other respects
is in favor of the argument syntax, eg \frac viz \over ....

When developing nfss we had to decide and the decision was in favor
for the argument syntax. But as i said it doesn't mean any changes to
existing latex files even if they are ported to 2e and not processed
in compatibility mode.

Frank